One eighteenth-century monarch, Frederick the Great, used the same magic in the promotion of the potato as a domestic crop, transforming something worthless and unwanted into something valuable through the elixir of psychology. The reason he wanted eighteenth-century Prussian peasants to cultivate and eat the potato was because he hoped that they would be less at risk of famine when bread was in short supply if they had an alternative source of carbohydrate; it would also make food prices less volatile. The problem was that the peasants weren’t keen on potatoes; even when Frederick tried
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